


Start All Over (Again)

by Reading Redhead (readingredhead)



Category: Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, Graduate School, Kid Fic, Parenthood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-25
Updated: 2012-12-25
Packaged: 2017-11-22 08:36:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/607885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/readingredhead/pseuds/Reading%20Redhead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Not for the first time, Nita worries that her life is one big series of bad ideas.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Start All Over (Again)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [astraev](https://archiveofourown.org/users/astraev/gifts).



It’s 7pm on a Tuesday night and Nita is sitting down to rest on the couch beside her daughter’s playpen, a glass of red wine in one hand and a stack of her student’s problem sets in the other, when the smell of smoke reaches her nostrils. She grits her teeth and feels like swearing, but Lizzy’s still at that stage where every new word is infinitely repeatable, and there are some words she’d rather her daughter not learn just yet. Some emotions, too, like the gnawing frustration that’s threatening to tear Nita apart.

She sets aside the problem sets and the wine glass and gets up to check on dinner. Opening the oven sets off the smoke alarm, and Nita spends a few minutes fanning the smoke away from the ill-placed smoke detector with a kitchen towel and opening the apartment windows up wide. She pauses for a second, listening for any noise in the other room, but Lizzy’s quiet. _Thank god she’s so good at entertaining herself. Probably still pretending to read to her stuffed animals._

Even before it’s out of the oven, Nita can tell that dinner is burnt beyond edibility. The one night she doesn’t have work but Kit does, and she can’t even make them a nice dinner. She wants to swear or maybe just cry, but instead she just pulls on her oven mitts a little too fiercely, grabs the roasting tin, and upends the thing into the trashcan, waiting for the sound of a half-hour’s work thunking into the garbage.

The thunk doesn’t come. Nita turns the tin back over. _Nonstick? Yeah right._ The chicken and veggies are all burnt to the bottom. She squeezes her eyes shut, opens them, and drops the pan in the sink. She calls up the local Chinese takeout place while it fills with water and orders their usual. Hopefully Kit will get home before the delivery man does; she’s not sure she has enough cash left in her wallet to tip. The bank was on the weekend errand list but somehow, between grocery shopping and watching Lizzy and getting called in to the lab at the last minute to check up on an experiment gone wrong, she didn’t get around to it.

Nita returns to the living room, sinks back down onto the couch, and tries not to think about all the time she wasted marinating the chicken and peeling and chopping the carrots and potatoes and parsnips, only to forget to set the timer. Not for the first time, she wonders how her mother managed it. Not for the first time, she wishes Mom were still here, to tell her what to do when things got bad and to share the moments with her when they were good.

Not for the first time, she worries that her life is one big series of bad ideas.

The problem with the bad ideas is how good they seemed at the time. She remembers how lucky she felt—how _blessed_ —when she landed a spot in Columbia’s biology PhD program (fully funded!) and Kit got offered a job at an Upper West Side high school. She remembers the beaming look on Kit’s face when they did the math and figured out they could afford to start a family, the face-splitting smile when she told him she was pregnant and the silent, heart-bursting awe when Elizabeth Armina Rodriguez was placed in his arms. She had to believe it was a good idea, even when her first advisor told her she would have a hard enough time getting jobs without also tying herself down to a husband and child (Nita smiled, thanked him for his advice, and immediately petitioned for a new advisor). She had to believe even harder when Lizzy was born almost a month premature and mother and daughter wound up in the hospital for weeks, right at the end of the school year when Nita and Kit could least afford to skip work. She has to believe it now, when the inquisitive toddler busy playing with her toys a few feet away is all that’s keeping Nita from losing it. _Maybe_ , she thinks, _I just can’t do this_.

She hears a key turn into the lock and relief pools through her for a second, like Kit can solve all her problems—like “her” problems and “his” problems are really separable things anymore. She leans back on the couch and closes her eyes tight and wonders if she can keep him from knowing something’s wrong.

“Where’s my girls?” he says, brushing by Nita and bending over the playpen’s rail to swoop up Lizzy in a hug. “Did you miss me, little one?”

Lizzy giggles and squeals out “Daddy home! Food now!” and Nita thinks, not for the first time, that her smile is just like her father’s.

Kit turns to face Nita, with Lizzy still in his arms, and says, “How was your day?”

It’s the wrong question. “I burned dinner,” she blubbers, “and the takeout is coming, but I don’t even think I have cash in my wallet.”

Kit shifts Lizzy, and sits down next to Nita on the sofa. “It’s alright, I’ve got this one,” he says, bouncing a still-giggling Lizzy on his knee.

Nita’s trying to be strong but she just can’t anymore. _And I just miss Mom, so much,_ she thinks, and she buries her face in Kit’s shoulder just like she nestles her most painful thoughts up against the comfort of his mind, and hopes for the best. She shakes, and he holds her with the arm that isn’t holding up their daughter, and she thinks that if this is all the universe ever asked of her she would be fine. _But it’s not. I’ll go to sleep and wake up and everything will start all over again_. She sniffles and tries very hard to stop crying. “We made these choices,” she says, sitting up straight and looking desperately at Kit, hoping he has the answer. “Did we do right?”

Lizzy gets bored with her perch on Kit’s knee, so she sprawls forward, covering both of their laps. “Mommy,” she says, doing her best to roll over so she can see Nita’s face. Nita helps her sit up and scoops her into her arms, cradling her to her chest and wondering when she got so big and how they’ve made it so far.

_She thinks we did right,_ Kit says, his arm still around Nita, the texture of his mind against hers an almost physical comfort. He squeezes her shoulder. _And for what it’s worth, so do I._

Nita breaths in deep and lets out a long sigh. _I’m not always sure,_ she admits, feeling like the worst wife, the worst mother, the worst _partner_. What was she thinking, jumping into all of this when she isn’t sure?

_I’m not always sure either,_ and she can feel the truth of his mindspeech, the layered memories of self-doubt to back him up. _But that’s how this works. As long as one of us is, and can be sure enough for the both of us, on the days when the other one isn’t._

 “Food now?” Lizzy asks, just as the apartment buzzer rings. Nita laughs weakly. _Powers that Be, please exempt her from any precognitive skills!_ she thinks, and feels Kit’s hearty assent.

*

Later over dinner, eaten straight out of plastic takeout containers (or, in Lizzy’s case, from the tray of her high chair), Kit says, “One of my kids has a parent who works at Teacher’s College.”

“Mmm?” Nita says through a mouthful of beef lo mein, her go-to comfort food.

“We got to talking, and he mentioned they have a joint program with Columbia’s history department,” Kit says. “You can get a master’s specifically in history education. One year fulltime, two years part-time.”

“You want to go back to school,” Nita says.

Kit smiles. “I never left!”

“Kit,” Nita says, worried he doesn’t understand, “you know we can’t afford it.”

Kit shakes his head. “That’s the great part,” he says. “Since you’re in a PhD program at Columbia, I could get tuition reduction. And I could get a grant from the high school to cover the rest. I’d get a raise, if I had an MA, and they’d let me teach more advanced classes. And then, when you get snapped up for a high-paying job after you graduate—”

Nita remembers her first advisor and snorts. Kit ignores her.

“—our income would be more than enough to think about…” Kit trails off, but Nita doesn’t need to read his mind to know what he’s thinking about. They never planned on Lizzy being an only child, but Nita isn’t sure she can handle going through it all again.

_It’ll be easier the second time around_ , Kit suggests. _We already know what to do._

Nita’s not convinced, but a ghost of memory from years ago flits through her mind: _Did we do right?_

_Go find out._

“How would you like to be a big sister, Lizzy?” Nita asks.

“Big sister Lizzy! Big sister Lizzy!” she chants, banging her fists on the tray, while her mother and father smile at their daughter and at each other, and start to think about making plans.

**Author's Note:**

> Nita and Kit’s first daughter is named for both of their mothers: Elizabeth for Nita’s mother, and Armina because it’s an acronym of Kit’s mother’s first name, Marina.
> 
> I am not a parent, so any unreasonable behavior on the part of parents and/or toddlers is the fault of my ignorance. I am, however, a grad student, and let me tell you, any unreasonable behavior on the part of grad students is the fault of grad school being thoroughly unreasonable.


End file.
